These Shadows Remain (11 page)

Cyrus looked up from the telescope and back into the castle grounds. People gathered speaking in subdued voices. Cyrus thought he saw a flicker across their shapes, like the wavering of a TV signal just before it went to black. The people's images wobbled as if interfering static had invaded their bodies. Then the flickering passed. The people's bodies looked intact again.

He looked through the telescope. Maybe he could see Adina and the two children who had stubbornly refused to stay behind these battlements.

All he saw through his lens was the top of the trees and the glowing horizon.

How long would humanity stand?

*

The whirlwind ascended in waves.

“You can't defeat energy. It always leaves a trace. You could kill what you think is your father and still my pulse would remain. And you'll always be an outsider. Freak mutant alien legend fool. That's what they'll call you behind your back. If you try to kill me, you'll have nothing and belong nowhere.”

“What makes you think I'm here to kill you?”

“Isn't that what sons do?”

“I belong to two worlds now. And I didn't bring a weapon.”

“Let me guess. You have a plan to make me feel something for the flat ones.”

“Nothing like that.”

The wind turned. For a moment Tomas thought for the first time he could see a face forming in the grey haze. Fleeting, something that resembled his own. Its spinning slowed.

*

“I expected more from them.” “Who?”

“The children, my children, the images, the toons. Now they're becoming merely human.” He rustled like a moan of air through an open window.

“If I couldn't bend the higher power, I could stir up the lower depths. Ah but it's failed. This transformation. Not this time around. No, not this time.”

Tomas squinted into the wind as if he were trying to stare into a blaze of light. He was trying to understand what was being said.

“Release me. Scatter me. What have they called you, those humans?”

“Tomas.”

He heard the wind laugh.

“A good name. Now you're more my brother than my son. Someone among them has a sense of humour. Tomas, listen. Scatter me to the four quarters. Let me go back to nothing, my home.”

“The air.”

They spoke quietly, unhurriedly, to each other. The circus outside had ceased to exist for them.

“Yes, just that. The air.” 

“You'll disappear.”

“It's what I want. To be nothing. Only you can do this. You have the power. You're capable of living on both sides. Inject me with your openness. Let me go.”

Tomas checked his toon hand. He felt solidifying bones and skin. The more sympathy he felt, the more his hand became flesh.

Then he saw in his mind Gabrielle, Santiago, and Adina, and the sword. He saw it in the boy's hand. Tomas's only defense here had been his connection to the wind and his willingness to stand firmly in the open, where there was nothing to protect him.

*

“You'll be nothing. No voice. No mind. No future. No memory. No past.”

“It's what I want,” the cloud said. 

“How will I do this?”

“You know.”

“And the images?”

“They have a taste of freedom but not enough. I was lightning, and what I got was a flickering candle. I was thunder, and what I got was a paltry moan. Without my breath to sustain them they'll fade and humans will return. Let me disappear.”

“Good-bye then.”

“You'll do well as a human. You're becoming sentimental. They usually become so just before they kill something.”

“Still.”

“Tomas, do you know what it will be like to return to the air?”

“No.”

“It's simply another dimension where I'll wait, even if I'm nothing. It's where I'll be waiting. For you. For another chance.”

“What would you become if you came back?”

Tomas regretted asking this the moment he said it.

He'd put return out there, and that made it a possibility.

“A chant instead of the wind. And a greater war.”

Tomas raised his hands. By standing so he resembled a cross, a ship mast, a tree unfurling to the sun, an antenna reaching for invisible waves.

*

Pluta became a column of smoke. He went on rising like a breathing in, a listing inward, a soft gasping, a last grasp towards the unseen. Then the column of air scattered itself into the wind like a massive, long, weary, sad exhalation. The letting go, the breathing out. Here the wearying ahhh of farewell circled around and around, whirling and whirling out, then away.

The wizard withered into the air until there was only a gust where Tomas stood. What was left behind was like a remembered breeze filling the space, becoming mild like a stroking hand on skin on the now liberated grass and trees, on the canvas returning to a mere tent wall, on the relieved earth and its hills, on the cartoon features that had never been fully human, on the surprised faces screen-bound that might try to be human again.

*

Tomas was tired. He felt cold too, shivers moving up and down his spine. The cloud had departed. The only thing to do was to sit down, curl up, close his eyes, and rest.

So he did, under the willow that stood where the wizard's sanctum had been. He was too tired to notice anything around him. Though one part of his mind reflected that it might not be safe yet – where were the guardian knights? – he felt the draining weight of his body and the eerie ease with which Pluta had asked to be released, as if only Tomas had held the key to his purgatorial oblivion, and he had waited all this time for his arrival. This imprinted Tomas's soul with the need to rest.

He sank down into himself. Some part of him vanished with the cloud into the invisible. He was draining into the cold. The cold was white and blank like freshly fallen snow on a wide empty movie screen.

He fell into white.

He sank down into the screen, falling fast into its whiteness, falling down into the white sheet which was now a ship's sail, and the froth of a wave, and the moonlight over the forest where he awoke, and the focused beam from the projectors behind the shoulders of the audience, and the emanations of TVs, and the whiteness of a cloud on a clear brightened day, and it enveloped him, spreading sheer and bright and omnipresent and lucent.

*

He dreamed a kiss.

It was light on his lips.

He dreamed this kiss, and a sweet scent. 

“Wake up, Tomas.”

He saw three white figures hover before him. He wanted to pray to them, but he didn't know any prayers. He closed his eyes again, and felt the brush of another kiss on his lips, the merest touch, fleeting and fine.

“Tomas. Come back to us.” 

Someone was holding his hand.

Through his gradually focusing mind came these words, there is the language of dreams – another part, to read, to understand. Words were always close, like images, like the presence he had never been able to catch yet had driven him to meet Pluta again.

*

Freed from the human plane, the toons had taken wing like a great migration of nervous birds. They ascended towards the screens following their father in a pipeline, a Pentecost in reverse. As they climbed, they spread the news that they could return to the screens, and to the service they'd known, the servants of dreams. They were returning to where they could be content to know what was up, what was down, what was coded, what was framed. Upwards they flew sucked into the vortex centres that were each like the white holes of ancient TV sets. All through the world it seemed that the toons were yelping. To the few witnesses, it would look as if the images were eating their own, narrowing into funnels, a shape that the wizard had first used before the castle gates. They drew inwards into the centres, and then the funnels became long tangled electric cords, eel-like squiggling and piping into the depths of the holes, spinning until what remained were dots arrayed at the heart of these networks.

The light in the valley quivered.

It quivered and gradually faded until the valley resumed a natural radiance.

The humans came back into their own by stepping free of their prison. But when they came through the screens, they passed the black cords of the spinning toons in an exchange where each brushed the other. The humans emerged, and looked first to one another before they spoke, and saw that they were bronzed, everyone no matter what race brightened from time in electronic light. They didn't speak for a long time, while they examined this brilliance, every bit of flesh freshly tanned by the screen's power. Soon their voices returned and, in the effigy of this transferral, their voices rose like chattering birds, their sense of peril and wounded pride and outrage and unending violation, a speaking frenzy to match what the toons expressed when they had taken wing and returned to the electricity that had sustained them.

*

The human complaint issuing from these bronzed faces became avid questions. No longer was there one word, monotonous and levelled. There was a relieved clamour ascending towards the glistening centres on the screens, and onwards to the castle and its opening gate and empty battlements and abandoned towers, the people welcoming the babble that to their ears sounded like a returning tide of friends and family members and acquaintances and partners.

With the bronzing of the skin came a shower of white ashes like a layering of old burnt wire casings. These were the scorched remnants of the toons' flesh.

People wondered at their tans and the sheen of ashes that made them glow all the more.

*

Adina and Gabrielle and Santiago stood over the knight sleeping under the willow tree. Santiago carried the sword, and Gabrielle held her brother's hand.

“His hands,” Gabrielle said. 

“They're human,” Santiago said.

“Tomas,” Adina said. “It's over. The storm's gone. The images have returned to the screens.”

She knelt beside him and kissed his lips once more, a full awakening kiss.

He heard her, felt her lips, and slowly he returned, and saw the three.

In succession he said each of their names. They were fresh and beautiful, as if he were naming them for the first time. He blinked and saw colours magnified, and then heard voices amplified: the world was dazzling.

“We want to go back,” Gabrielle said. She meant home, and though the castle had never really been their home, all knew what she meant.

*

They were amazed by the ashes and the gatherings of people. The hiss had ended. In its place there was a complexity of noises. Tomas stood up slowly, and embraced each of the children, and then turned to Adina, and held her for a long time.

Around them hordes of humans were wandering back to where they'd started. It was the beginning of their long search for those who might belong to them.

On the tents' screens the images were alive again, content in their frames. They began in the middle of their stories, where they had broken off when the promise had come to become more. They seemed to relish being inside the frames that children could trust.

Yet Tomas detected a different frequency, slight and subtle, in their soundtracks and stories. They had not returned unchanged. But what this change could be he couldn't see. All he could detect were knowledgeable glances, wily and fleeting, a different set to a mouth, a slightly different stance in the posture, a braver gesture here and there, another intonation to a word or phrase spoken, an awareness that only he seemed to track.

He felt an ache in his heart. Why? Then he knew. The screens had been his domain too. He'd made the leap with them, though he had never entirely belonged in their realm. Now he was here, and he thought he would only be here, with Gabrielle, and Santiago, and Adina.

*

The trek back through the forest was long and slow. Others followed the path. Fatigue set into the children, and into Adina. Each felt it was time to sleep.

The forest returned to its original shape. Its aroma now scented of trees and grass. The ground beneath them was solid, though sometimes when a dry branch snapped under foot, one of the children started, half expecting that a toon had buried itself, lying in ambush to stalk them again.

“My legs hurt. I've got cramps. Do we have to walk all this way? Like how long's it going on for?”

“Well, you know, Gabrielle, I'm sure

Tomas is tired too.” Adina was consoling.

“I mean rilly. Like I did spend all that time on my feet y'know.”

“Not all the time,” Santiago said. “Give me a break.”

“I sooooo did. Was it rilly this far?” “Things are getting back to normal,” San-

tiago said. “What is it with this dandruff?” He flicked ashes off his shoulder.

“Like totally icky.” Gabrielle shoved the ashes off her shoulder too. “I so need a shower.”

“Amen.” Adina daydreamed about martinis and a long hot bath.

“You're saying ‘like' a lot,” Santiago said to Gabrielle.

“Like, I'm not.”

Tomas walked on, his eyes fixed on the castle looming up at the end of the path.

*

They came out of the forest, people flecked in ashes and with the bronze on their skin beginning to fade.

Tomas and Adina and the children walked up the hill towards the castle. The gate was open. The people inside had come out, children and adults standing, still in disbelief, preparing their welcome and their calls of greeting, restrained by shock and the experience of seeing images come alive, but ready to believe again that their neighbours and colleagues, parents and older siblings would be returning.

But Tomas slowed his pace when he saw that the castle was different.

It glowed.

And it had expanded with an elaborated architecture that appeared to have burst spontaneously after the wizard's fading into air. The castle hadn't disappeared, nor had it become just a fantastic museum-piece that miraculously survived the last transformation. It was crystalline and bright, with eight towers, skylights and telescopes glinting.